Category: Books

Not that we ever left, but I have to admit that our game has slipped a bit the last few years or so. I’ve been writing less on the blog and new shirts and such have become less frequent. I’m happy to report that with the new website and a bit of perspective that’s all going to change.

If you need conversation material at parties, I suggest planning a seven thousand mile bike ride. It gives you the ability to talk to anybody. It’s a story that spreads on its own. People will just walk right up to you and ask, “Is it true? Holy shit.”

I just turned 30, and I’ve decided to use this year to radically shape the rest of my life. I am about to leave my job and ride a bicycle for seventeen months, from Oregon to Patagonia. The need to do it (and it really felt like a need) hit me about three years ago when I read a quote from famed naturalist John Muir.

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

When I became a bicycle courier I found that I loved cycling for a living. I loved the exhilaration of pedalling quickly through the city, flowing between stationary cars and weaving through the lines of moving traffic. I loved the mindlessness of the job, the absolute focus on the body in movement, the absence of office politics and cubicle-induced anxiety. I loved the blissful, annihilating exhaustion at the end of a day’s work, the dead sleep haunted only by memories of the bicycle. Hypnagogic jerks, those juddery twitches that occur on the edges of sleep, were smoothed out into circular pedal-strokes of the legs. Most of all, I loved learning what London taxi drivers call the Knowledge: the litany of street names and business addresses that constitutes a particular map of the city, parallel to that contained within the A–Z street atlas but written on the brain, read by leg and eye.